A Thousand Years of Harvest: The Twin Farming Almanacs

In 2077, desert agriculture PhD Su Yu was restoring missing pages of his grandfather's surviving copy of Chen Fu's Book on Agriculture when he unexpectedly formed a link of consciousness with Ye Qinghe, a female physician at the Southern Song Dynasty's Agricultural Administration Bureau, 800 years in the past. Hidden in the pages was the “Grain Vein Resonance System,” which required the two agricultural experts from different eras to work together to save their ecosystems across time and space

Song Dynasty timeline: Ye Qinghe fights an unprecedented plague of mutant locusts in eastern Zhejiang, but the gentry question her because she is a woman. She has no choice but to combine the modern locust gene maps sent by Su Yu with the ancient agricultural text Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the People and its method of “using insects to control insects.” She digs frog ponds beside the rice paddies and cultivates locust-resistant rice.

Modern timeline: Su Yu works to improve drought-resistant wheat in the Taklamakan Desert, while drones belonging to Gene Ark keep a watchful eye on him. Inspired by Ye Qinghe's notes on locust control, he incorporates the principles of the Song Dynasty's “treading plow” into smart farming machinery, then uses CRISPR technology to create “twin wheat” with roots like those of the saxaul tree.

As their collaboration deepens, the two discover that the truth behind “Grain Vein Resonance” is far beyond anything they imagined: the locust-resistant rice Ye Qinghe developed turns out to be the underlying code for the 2050 “Shennong System,” and the blood of Song Dynasty agricultural officials flows through Su Yu's DNA. When Gene Ark launches its “Reverse Grain Vein Plan,” attempting to destroy farmland in both eras with a locust plague across time, Su Yu and Ye Qinghe must find a balance between the wisdom of a thousand-year-old agricultural text and the technology of the future